Settling in Seattle

In Waxwings Jonathan Raban triumphantly transfers the skills of an award-winning travel writer to his second novel. (The first was written 18 years ago.) Like the author, the principal character has moved from Britain to Seattle, ‘where herring gulls were a traffic hazard and all streets led down to the water’. Tom Janeway is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington with a minor reputation for his short radio talks. But this is not the satirical university world of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury. Millennium-year America (just before the dotcom bubble bursts and before 9/11) is vividly and amusingly evoked, but the excesses and ambiguities of a society which is both provincial and vibrantly international are observed with tolerant understanding. Raban sees America with an incomer’s clarity and a resident’s affection.

Tom is ‘more a bookworm than a novelist’, most at home among the characters of Victorian fiction whom he studies but also living in the same world as the rest of us, ‘some of the time anyhow’ as a police officer concedes while interviewing him. He is a man to whom things happen. They usually take him rather endearingly by surprise — like his wife’s announcement over a glass of wine that she intends to leave him. Excited by her 24-hour, seven-day-a-week job with on-line realtors Getashack.com, Beth is growing away from him and from the dilapidated, gloomy wooden house in which they live (ranch- style, 1910). He has no idea until that moment that she finds him dreary, bookish and self-absorbed or that she resents his joke (repeated in one of his broadcasts) that her share options are just Swift’s sunbeams extracted from cucumbers.

An illegal immigrant from China — another traveller through America — gives a different perspective on modern America as he moves in and uses Tom’s house as his next step up.